


Somehow I Just Knew

by Krasimer



Series: You've Got To Just Believe (Can I Get An Amen) [4]
Category: Bendy and the Ink Machine
Genre: Bendy (Bendy and the Ink Machine) Worship, Canon Compliant, During Canon, False Memories, Henry get out, Henry no, Henry-centric, Joey Drew Studios, M/M, Oh wait, Repressed Memories, Something Made Them Do It, You should have left, mostly - Freeform, sorry about that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-04
Updated: 2018-11-04
Packaged: 2019-08-18 18:43:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16522562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Krasimer/pseuds/Krasimer
Summary: He might also have been lying to himself.His old desk had been left untouched in the middle of the disastrous ruin of the studio. He had fallen through a floor and found coffins.Or had he?Had he?He couldn’t remember anymore.





	Somehow I Just Knew

There were flashes of something at the corners of his eyes.

Something following him, ink washing over the walls and dripping down to form puddles of the stuff on the ground. It made Henry nervous – Something had happened here. Whatever it was had definitely been a disaster – the slaughtered Boris and the messages on the walls and the puddles of ink like blood.

And he still couldn’t find Joey.

Henry gripped the ax a little tighter, holding it close to his chest as he kept walking. If he just kept walking, then maybe he would be okay. The hairs on the back of his neck were standing on end, the sensation of being watched was making his chest tight with worry, but if he kept moving he might be okay.

He might also have been lying to himself.

His old desk had been left untouched in the middle of the disastrous ruin of the studio. He had fallen through a floor and found coffins.

Or had he?

_Had he?_

He couldn’t remember anymore. There was something strange about his memories, about the way things were happening around him. He couldn’t remember what Linda had sounded like, or what he’d come to see.

Joey had called him in, right?

The chance to be together after so long had been a potent lure. (Hadn’t it?)

His hands shook as he flinched away from a noise that seemed to have come from all around him. Henry shook his head, trying to block it out. He’d been hearing a lot of noises – earlier, he’d heard someone whistling through a door. Even though he was certain he’d heard them, he was not sure they’d been real.

“You’ve cracked, Henry,” he muttered. Absently, as he passed one, he patted a time card machine. “On time as _always_ ,” he whispered to it. With a sigh, he hefted the ax back into his hands and nodded. “I should keep moving.”

He wanted to find Joey, after all.

The writing was all around him on the walls, sometimes. The messages he kept finding were nightmarish, almost.

There was something familiar about them, however, something almost comforting. For all that they looked like blood, they almost felt safer than anything else he’d seen. When he looked at his hands, he kept thinking he saw blood like ink, surrounded by the ink like blood. A cut on his hand, an injury that had scarred—

Had it scarred?

There was no scar on his hand.

But sure as anything, he thought he could remember an injury there. Something big, something damaging, scar tissue and blood and pain.

Henry looked around at the ink on the floor and the walls, taking a deep breath as he continued to move. Flashes of something warped across his mind as he walked through the labyrinthian corridors of the studio. Had it always been this big? He didn’t think so, couldn’t remember the walls he’d walked for years being this cavernous, this deep into the ground. Joey Drew Studios had only had so much of a budget, after all. There had only ever been so much allowance for growth, even in their heyday.

No matter what Joey’s dreams had been, there had only been so far that they could have gotten. Only so much expansion they could have had.

In conjunction with the broken in flooring, something wasn’t adding up.

Jumping at another noise behind him, Henry turned around –

Only to have his face meet something hard and pain-causing. He was only dimly aware as he hit the floor and a voice he thought he recognized came pouring through the darkness towards him.

 

X

 

When he woke up again, he was tied to a pillar.

Someone with skin like inky blackness, like the very heart of the darkness itself, stood in front of him. They cocked their head at him, chuckling in a way that made him more than a little uncomfortable. The Bendy mask only made it worse.

He recognized the voice now, however.

This was what remained of Sammy Lawrence. Henry felt bile rise in his throat as he looked at his former co-worker, a piece of the puzzle finally falling into place. Whatever Joey had done, this was a result of it. He could remember, now, the first iteration of the ink machine.

He had been there for the advent of it.

Back then, it had only been a little thing, incapable of anything but pumping the ink out and into bottles. Joey had always been adamant on him using that ink over anything else, though he had let Henry use his own brushes and pens. The ink had to be that stuff, however. That was just how Joey had been.

Henry could remember that much, now. Could remember enough to know that he probably should have just left the studio the moment he opened the door. Maybe he ought to have damned his hopes and dreams, thrown out the letter and said goodbye to any reconciliation. There had been fights between him and Joey, had been enough of a vast darkness between them, that it might have yielded a better result if he had just let it lie.

Their friendship had been buried six feet deep so long ago, why had he thought to come back and hope for a better ending?

As Sammy rambled on, his fanaticism glaringly obvious, Henry couldn’t help but think about who the man had been before. A bit of a stern fellow, particular about his workspace, insistent on working where he wanted to instead of where he should have been. Sammy had been kind, though, when it came to just about anything other than work. The obsession with keeping himself on the job had been why Joey had hired him in the first place.

But when he and Norman had met, Henry remembered that too.

The projectionist and the songwriter.

It had been a sweet story. A lovely moment in a workplace that had already begun spiraling out of control. Henry had even caught them kissing, once. Their proclivities had never bothered him, not with how he felt for Joey.

They had seemed to be meant for each other, no matter what the world outside their studio thought.

Sammy had actually come to Henry, once, and asked him about how to tell someone how he felt. It had almost been adorable, if he thought about it. A grown man, blushing like a schoolgirl, asking how to tell someone he loved them. With a little bit of advice, Sammy had smiled and thanked him and gone on his way.

Three days later, Henry had walked into the coatroom and found them speaking in soft voices, Norman occasionally leaning down and pressing kisses to Sammy’s cheeks and mouth. He’d cleared his throat and knocked on the door and smiled at the both of them before hanging up his coat and bidding them a good morning. The three of them had laughed and Henry had gone on his way.

A tiny spark of light in the steadily darkening atmosphere of the studio.

That had been after Betsy’s wedding, after all. After meeting Linda and Joey not talking to him much anymore and dating Linda and Joey pulling further away and _marrying Linda._

Absently, more than a little aware that he was probably concussed, Henry spared a thought to his ex-wife. To their children. To their grandchildren, unborn but coming soon. Their eldest daughter, Lauren, pregnant with her first. Their son, Timothy, expecting his second any day now. Even Charlotte, twenty years old and still such a baby in his eyes, was probably going to be engaged soon. Her young man had been showing signs of buying her a ring, after all.

If he died here, Henry would never see any of that.

He almost missed it when Sammy was taken away, the darkness rising around him and dragging him off.

What he did not miss, however, was when Boris stepped out into the light and smiled at him.

**Author's Note:**

> So good news and bad news.
> 
> Good News: I'm updating this as part of my NaNoWriMo this year!
> 
> Bad News: My external hard drive, with eight years of writing and the most recent save files of all my fics, is dead. I dropped it all of four inches and now it won't let me access anything. It also, before it went completely down, deleted all 24K of my FMA Homunculus AU.


End file.
